What's wrong with doing both? You conserve to stretch the remaining supplies (to mitigate the risk of the solution taking longer than you expect) while simultaneously embarking on a Sputnik style project to find alternatives.
If I understand this correctly, this will prevent cocaine users from getting high. But how does it affect the LD50 (dosage sufficient to kill 50% of the population)?
A cocaine user decides to get high after being "immunized." He snorts a few lines. Huh. Nothing. So he snorts more and more... at some point I am willing to wager he will suffer cardiac arrest or some other life-threatening problem on his quest towards getting high. If the LD50 is not much changed, this may occur pretty easily.
Also, cocaine has a very rapid onset. I am thinking it wouldn't take much to overwhelm the slower immune system response.
This is an interesting experiment as it is always worthwhile to better understand the immune system, but I think this would be a Real Bad Idea to actually implement. Unless the objective is to kill all cocaine users.
Any nuclear reactor, by definition, must use radioactive material. This material can be used to make a "dirty" bomb, thus, all such material is highly regulated by the US Government. Some apartment building will NOT be allowed to have one of these. The security that would be required would price it right out of the market. Perhaps one could be built under the police department in a good sized city?
One could make a logical argument regarding the true danger posed by a dirty bomb, but the US Government seems to have completely abandoned logic as a basis for any of their actions.
The Islamists of the Middle East, who have the largest share of the world oil reserves, seem to have conveniently made it very difficult to get approval for their main energy competitor. In the end we may come to understand that their objective is financial rather than ideological.
This will only be practical for long haul over-ocean flights. Even if they go up to FL 999 (99,900 feet) or higher they will cause a sonic boom so nobody wants them flying overhead (nor is it currently permitted in this country AT LEAST). This will also be an expensive plane to design, produce, test and operate. Combine those two and the economics will keep it to boutique operations involving the very wealthy and corporate executives.
The travel times will be limited by the climb phase (subsonic until far enough over the ocean, then limited by airframe limits until altitude high enough/air thin enough to allow full design speed) and the terminal descent phase where again, they have to slow down as altitude decreases and the air gets denser, and then drop subsonic as they get closer to the destination. Add in routing and sequencing to this whole mess and the great speeds have their best advantage only on the longer flights.
PS, will they extend Class A controlled airspace to over 60,000 feet now? Talk about VFR on top!!
The marketing line is part of the OEM sales agreement. This is just like "We recommend Duracell batteries" which was required to get into the best pricing tiers. I don't know the exact deal Lenovo or Dell gets from Microsoft but I would say that if you were them you would probably do the exact same thing. When you become a publicly owned corporation your duty is to the shareholders, not to follow some ideological path which may or may not have some future goodwill benefit. Placing that line in the marketing materials has a tangible financial result yet does nothing to persuade anyone who has done due diligence to buy Vista.
Both the cable company and Ma Bell gave me wireless routers with their broadband service. They insisted, even though I already was completely set up. They told me not to mess with the settings and password protected the setup (actually I gave away the things after resetting to factory defaults). Their wireless in both cases was set up as completely open.
Every so often my WinXP laptop decides to connect to a neighbor and this seems to always happen when I need to access another machine here or print something and am in a hurry. Almost all neighbors are open as well.
I think with all local major ISPs locking wireless APs to open access it would be hard to convince a court someone was doing something wrong by accessing the net that way (but you never know, SCO has been going on for how long now?).
A friend at IBM says their policy is to prohibit employees from accessing other people's APs without express permission as it might be considered illegal. Perhaps this is wise for a company in order to protect themselves, but for personal use I can't really see much harm.
If you have fire insurance (homeowner's or renter's) then they should cover the laptop and any damage to your house or other belongings, subject to the deductible. The insurance company may go after (subrogate) Dell.
Most companies play hardball and tell you to get lost, the only thing you can do is sue them, and then they will complain about people suing them. As they say, shit happens, but if it turns out the manufacturer knew, or reasonably should have known, that the batteries pose an undue hazard, they may be held liable in court. In the USA, there is basicly no more consumer protection so you are on your own. Some other countries (and a few states) will hold the manufacturer's toes to the fire (so to speak) so they may act a little more responsibly.
My LPs are great. I can play them on ANY turntable, in any room, bring them to friend's houses and listen also. no DRM, no compatibility problems, and they sound just fine on any decent system. And I never heard of anyone getting busted and sued for listening to their LPs in another room or at a friend's.
Books. Again, no DRM, no nonsense, so long as there is some light I can read. When I am done I can put it on a shelf for years and it will still work, or I can lend to a friend, or give it away, and there is no problem. Zero police/RIAA/MPAA involvement. And if I want more, there is the library!
The newer is not necessarily better. Yes, digital is a great technological feat but congress is either asleep at the wheel or completely bought off by media companies and are allowing an ever-increasing tightening of laws and technology to assure compliance with these laws. Penalties are now criminal instead of just civil (actually, *both* criminal and civil) and are rapidly approaching punishment levels beyond violent crime.
Like another poster mentioned, there is always the outdoors. All the side garbage that comes with new media effectively raises its price. There becomes a point where it is too much of a luxury and while revenues will seem to be on the increase, sales numbers will be on the decline, with a narrower and narrower catalogue of new titles. Prices will have to be increased, volumes will drop further, until the media conglomerates have eliminated piracy and have 100% control and STILL revenues are decreasing. At that point they will either collapse or succeed in getting legislation passed to subsidize themselves at taxpayer expense. Smaller government Republicans, and Hollywood paided Democrats will both embrace these ideas.
I have bid on a number of items, won them, and the sellers refused to sell. My view is that if the price reached was too low, too bad. I didn't set up the auction so I didn't set the terms - the seller did!
Did I give negative feedback? No. Why not? Because I didn't feel these deals were worth the retaliatory negative feedback. Ebay's feedback policy artificially boosts their average feedback numbers so they can say that overall satisfaction is higher than it really is.
In a few cases I paid and never received the items and the sellers kept ripping off more people because Ebay's policies require such a long time before they will even look at a deal gone bad.
Low prices are just a way for smart buyers to compensate them for the risk of dealing with Ebay.
I have a Treo and is has only one light. Blinking means message or missed call, lit means charging. All other times it is off. Seems like an appropriate use of a single indicator to me.
I certainly noticed, and appreciated, the women while I was there. Both for their strong femininity and their different viewpoint in many areas.
It is an obvious jump to guess I am also against affirmative action as this quota is simply a form of that. And yes, students are getting better every year (although this comes with a price - increasing mental illness issues due to the incredible stress). But MIT is not in a vacuum, the question is: how does the MIT student body compare to other universities? And I think what is beginning to happen is that those that were on a par are now better than MIT and those lower are catching up. I see MIT as the ultimate, the place to train future scientists and engineers to solve the toughest problems, an education that teaches us to really reach. There are only a fixed number of slots for students and if you do anything but base admission on ability you are quite logically ending up with a student body that is less able than it could have been. If that means it will be 85% Asian as you mention, then so be it. Maybe if that happened it would serve as a wake-up call to our society and schools in America. Nothing else seems to.
I agree. I, also, am an alum from before her reign. Her desire to set the male-female ratio at 1:1 was a de-facto quota system which resulted in 1 out of 4 females being admitted compared to 1 out of 12 males. This, plain and simple, reduced the academic quality of the student body. I saw this when I was there and professors I have kept in contact mention it all the time. Some have had to lighten up on the course material while others have been able to make do with adjusting the grading curve a bit.
This year's application looked more like a liberal arts college application than an engineering school's. I just hope MIT gets a hold of themselves and moves more in the direction of academic excellence over artificial quota systems. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against women going to top engineering schools, but the reality is that right now if you want the best students in that field it will be less then 50% female.
My donations ceased a while ago and will not resume until this situation is corrected.
Let's say I buy $10,000 worth of stuff then after a while sell it on eBay for $5,000. I have a loss, right?
Technically, yes, but not necessarily to the IRS. The IRS, not seeing that you are running the sales as a true business (separate bank account, profit motive, etc etc) will consider it as a "hobby" in which case they treat it like a one-way valve: *any* money coming in must be taxed, but you cannot deduct expenses.
Bottom line: if they implement this and you are considering selling significant amounts of stuff, first talk to your accountant to work out a way to protect yourself from this trap. It's not all that hard to set up if you know what to do.
Over the years I have seen a good number of drive failures. In a lot of cases people have asked (and are willing to pay for my time and expenses) if I could recover data. I am successful well over half the time, and that is without any special equipment.
Many failures are indeed in the electronics board. Ebay is a great resource to find used but functional drives. Really, really try hard to get a drive with a close serial number. It sometimes makes the difference between success and failure. You do not need to do any soldering to replace the board; I have never seen a board soldered to the drive mechanism on any 5.25, 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive. Be aware some drives store parameters in eeprom which match bad blocks of the specific drive mechanism, also some store other calibration data. You will not always get all the data, and not in nice neat order. You will need a disk data recovery program to look at all the FATs and backup copies and piece things together.
I have gone even further, opening up the drive assembly. Be prepared to lose everything when you do this, but I can tell you it is a myth that the drive sill self destruct immediately if not in a clean room. I have run 10k SCSI drives for hours after replacing head and preamp assemblies and recovered data. Then I take the magnets out because the drive should never be used again (I have a wicked collection of astoundingly strong magnets).
As you guessed from the last paragraph I have seen failures of the read amps which are mounted frequently on the flex circuit going to the heads. I have replaced these chips but the patience of a saint is required not to mention a steady hand, magnifying light, and Pace SMT workstation.
I have only seen a few real head crashes. The absolute worst was a Barracuda SCSI of mine (figures) which wiped half the metalization off the platters. Then I found my DAT backups were useless. That one I decided to send to a pro shop where they determined the internal read preamp for a critical track died, probably due to heat, and somehow this caused full deflection head oscillation until crashed occurred. At least that's what they told me. The drive was in a system where the air conditioning failed and the room got to 160 degrees F while I was away.
Heat kills, indeed, and it shows up in greatly reduced MTBF of solid state components or in my case outright failure. I have not seen many wear out failures of the mechanicals, perhaps that is because I cater mostly to home and small business users who tend to turn their systems off at night. I also recommend replacement of drives where the bearings get noisy as the noise is caused by vibration and vibration can cause head crashes, and enough of those can cause a catastrophic crash with the head flipping over and scraping (which causes dust which causes the other heads to crash...).
I'm getting too old for these repairs. I can't wait until the solid state drives become common.
Every company has legal representation but that is not the point. Most companies are not in the legal business and to take on a fight in that realm costs a lot more than legal fees, it takes the company away from their focus and gets them stuck fighting a stupid lawsuit. If you have never been involved in a corporate lawsuit there is just no way I can fully explain it but the time it takes away from key personnel is simply enormous. At one company they were pretty clear that each developer and project manager was expected to bring in ten times their salary in gross income. This was in NYC where a lot of the crew made $80-100k. So the company expects one of them to be bringing in $800k-1M a year in revenue... now that may give you an idea of how expensive a lawsuit can be if they tie up a lot of people reviewing unending paperwork. They can kill you on the opportunity cost alone. This is why the lawyers you are so quick to have come to your defense will tell you that you are better off settling. And if that is the advice of your experts, you may even have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to follow it.
You are completely missing the point. The BSA is looking to make money by getting a "settlement." If you refuse to do this they will sue and it will cost you a small furtune to even GET to a jury. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, not to mention lost productivity. This is what they hold over your head! Either give us $30,000 or we sue you and even if you win you lose far more than that.
As they collect these settlements they use that to force other companies into settling.
I work at a small company and we have bought all our PCs from Dell with XP (and in some cases MS Office) pre-installed. Over time we have migrated to Open Office. Windows-only business applications keep us locked with Microsoft. A friend (in an admittedly larger company) in NYC told me of their BSA audit, which was triggered when they had a layoff and someone made wild accusations to the BSA hotline. Having sales receipts, POs, cancelled checks, stickers on the PCs, etc was NOT ENOUGH. The auditors will accept nothing as proof, apparently, and from minute one they were talking about a "settlement." Even before they knew if there was anything wrong! They seem to slant the audit to make sure to find fault, no matter how perfect the company is.
So that is my worry. Here I sit, with all software licensed and paid for, but unable to meet some impossible standard and being forced by an extortion scheme to pay again.
There may be ways around Vista DRM by using proprietary working formats Vista does not identify as protectable.
What I would be more concerned with is the "security" of the information that is being worked on. Without having to critically listen to every copy of the work, how can you assure that Vista's DRM hasn't triggered and reducred the quality of your work to trash without your knowledge.
Unless data integrity can be assured, there may be no alternative but to avoid Vista for any production work.
You can refuse to answer questions that seem to be way out of line. For example, if at a deposition in an intellectual property case like this you are asked if you every had any affairs and with whom and when and all the details of what you did, you could refuse and insist that it go before the judge before you answer.
Personally, I'm a pain in the ass and would just refuse certain questions and if I had to go to jail on contempt charges, so be it, but you can be most assured it would not be in vain for there would be significant press coverage. Perhaps stupid in some people's view, but that is about the only chance I would have to create public awareness of a major problem in the legal system.
If you take out psychology then sniping wouldn't help in the eBay proxy bid system. However, psychology plays a big part in many eBay auctions where people get emotionally involved in winning, no matter the cost.
I have bought thousands of items on eBay (and sold many also, fortunately for more than I spent!) and I can in no uncertain terms sniping is the way to go to win more auctions. When I need a part or item I set up a snipe for a bit more than I think it is worth and frequently pay less than I thought I would. There are no guarantees, though, and I most definitely do not win every auction. Before I learned to snipe (back then I despised snipers) I would bid $20 for a $5 component and usually lose but now when I bid say $7 and usually win. Yeah, this sucks for the sellers, but is made up for by the auctions I lose (frequently there is only the winning bid above mine) where the proxy bid system works as planned and boosts the selling price.
*All* the phones should be "wired" with some of them using the wires and others using radio transmission, and this should not be known to the test subjects nor the people setting up the tests (double blind).
I already have several calls from clients who want me to shut off open access in their places of business. Yes, they have firewalls and are protected, but the DA Jenine Pirro has come out and said how open wireless hotspots help pedophiles and stalkers and these business owners do not want to get involved with this political hot potatoe in any way whatsoever. Their feeling is that it simply is not worth the risk anymore.
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What's wrong with doing both? You conserve to stretch the remaining supplies (to mitigate the risk of the solution taking longer than you expect) while simultaneously embarking on a Sputnik style project to find alternatives.
If I understand this correctly, this will prevent cocaine users from getting high. But how does it affect the LD50 (dosage sufficient to kill 50% of the population)?
A cocaine user decides to get high after being "immunized." He snorts a few lines. Huh. Nothing. So he snorts more and more... at some point I am willing to wager he will suffer cardiac arrest or some other life-threatening problem on his quest towards getting high. If the LD50 is not much changed, this may occur pretty easily.
Also, cocaine has a very rapid onset. I am thinking it wouldn't take much to overwhelm the slower immune system response.
This is an interesting experiment as it is always worthwhile to better understand the immune system, but I think this would be a Real Bad Idea to actually implement. Unless the objective is to kill all cocaine users.
Any nuclear reactor, by definition, must use radioactive material. This material can be used to make a "dirty" bomb, thus, all such material is highly regulated by the US Government. Some apartment building will NOT be allowed to have one of these. The security that would be required would price it right out of the market. Perhaps one could be built under the police department in a good sized city?
One could make a logical argument regarding the true danger posed by a dirty bomb, but the US Government seems to have completely abandoned logic as a basis for any of their actions.
The Islamists of the Middle East, who have the largest share of the world oil reserves, seem to have conveniently made it very difficult to get approval for their main energy competitor. In the end we may come to understand that their objective is financial rather than ideological.
This will only be practical for long haul over-ocean flights. Even if they go up to FL 999 (99,900 feet) or higher they will cause a sonic boom so nobody wants them flying overhead (nor is it currently permitted in this country AT LEAST). This will also be an expensive plane to design, produce, test and operate. Combine those two and the economics will keep it to boutique operations involving the very wealthy and corporate executives.
The travel times will be limited by the climb phase (subsonic until far enough over the ocean, then limited by airframe limits until altitude high enough/air thin enough to allow full design speed) and the terminal descent phase where again, they have to slow down as altitude decreases and the air gets denser, and then drop subsonic as they get closer to the destination. Add in routing and sequencing to this whole mess and the great speeds have their best advantage only on the longer flights.
PS, will they extend Class A controlled airspace to over 60,000 feet now? Talk about VFR on top!!
The marketing line is part of the OEM sales agreement. This is just like "We recommend Duracell batteries" which was required to get into the best pricing tiers. I don't know the exact deal Lenovo or Dell gets from Microsoft but I would say that if you were them you would probably do the exact same thing. When you become a publicly owned corporation your duty is to the shareholders, not to follow some ideological path which may or may not have some future goodwill benefit. Placing that line in the marketing materials has a tangible financial result yet does nothing to persuade anyone who has done due diligence to buy Vista.
Both the cable company and Ma Bell gave me wireless routers with their broadband service. They insisted, even though I already was completely set up. They told me not to mess with the settings and password protected the setup (actually I gave away the things after resetting to factory defaults). Their wireless in both cases was set up as completely open.
Every so often my WinXP laptop decides to connect to a neighbor and this seems to always happen when I need to access another machine here or print something and am in a hurry. Almost all neighbors are open as well.
I think with all local major ISPs locking wireless APs to open access it would be hard to convince a court someone was doing something wrong by accessing the net that way (but you never know, SCO has been going on for how long now?).
A friend at IBM says their policy is to prohibit employees from accessing other people's APs without express permission as it might be considered illegal. Perhaps this is wise for a company in order to protect themselves, but for personal use I can't really see much harm.
Contact your state Attorney General's office. This is something they might well take a keen interest in.
If you have fire insurance (homeowner's or renter's) then they should cover the laptop and any damage to your house or other belongings, subject to the deductible. The insurance company may go after (subrogate) Dell.
Most companies play hardball and tell you to get lost, the only thing you can do is sue them, and then they will complain about people suing them. As they say, shit happens, but if it turns out the manufacturer knew, or reasonably should have known, that the batteries pose an undue hazard, they may be held liable in court. In the USA, there is basicly no more consumer protection so you are on your own. Some other countries (and a few states) will hold the manufacturer's toes to the fire (so to speak) so they may act a little more responsibly.
IANAL and all that craziness.
My LPs are great. I can play them on ANY turntable, in any room, bring them to friend's houses and listen also. no DRM, no compatibility problems, and they sound just fine on any decent system. And I never heard of anyone getting busted and sued for listening to their LPs in another room or at a friend's.
Books. Again, no DRM, no nonsense, so long as there is some light I can read. When I am done I can put it on a shelf for years and it will still work, or I can lend to a friend, or give it away, and there is no problem. Zero police/RIAA/MPAA involvement. And if I want more, there is the library!
The newer is not necessarily better. Yes, digital is a great technological feat but congress is either asleep at the wheel or completely bought off by media companies and are allowing an ever-increasing tightening of laws and technology to assure compliance with these laws. Penalties are now criminal instead of just civil (actually, *both* criminal and civil) and are rapidly approaching punishment levels beyond violent crime.
Like another poster mentioned, there is always the outdoors. All the side garbage that comes with new media effectively raises its price. There becomes a point where it is too much of a luxury and while revenues will seem to be on the increase, sales numbers will be on the decline, with a narrower and narrower catalogue of new titles. Prices will have to be increased, volumes will drop further, until the media conglomerates have eliminated piracy and have 100% control and STILL revenues are decreasing. At that point they will either collapse or succeed in getting legislation passed to subsidize themselves at taxpayer expense. Smaller government Republicans, and Hollywood paided Democrats will both embrace these ideas.
I have bid on a number of items, won them, and the sellers refused to sell. My view is that if the price reached was too low, too bad. I didn't set up the auction so I didn't set the terms - the seller did!
Did I give negative feedback? No. Why not? Because I didn't feel these deals were worth the retaliatory negative feedback. Ebay's feedback policy artificially boosts their average feedback numbers so they can say that overall satisfaction is higher than it really is.
In a few cases I paid and never received the items and the sellers kept ripping off more people because Ebay's policies require such a long time before they will even look at a deal gone bad.
Low prices are just a way for smart buyers to compensate them for the risk of dealing with Ebay.
I have a Treo and is has only one light. Blinking means message or missed call, lit means charging. All other times it is off. Seems like an appropriate use of a single indicator to me.
I certainly noticed, and appreciated, the women while I was there. Both for their strong femininity and their different viewpoint in many areas. It is an obvious jump to guess I am also against affirmative action as this quota is simply a form of that. And yes, students are getting better every year (although this comes with a price - increasing mental illness issues due to the incredible stress). But MIT is not in a vacuum, the question is: how does the MIT student body compare to other universities? And I think what is beginning to happen is that those that were on a par are now better than MIT and those lower are catching up. I see MIT as the ultimate, the place to train future scientists and engineers to solve the toughest problems, an education that teaches us to really reach. There are only a fixed number of slots for students and if you do anything but base admission on ability you are quite logically ending up with a student body that is less able than it could have been. If that means it will be 85% Asian as you mention, then so be it. Maybe if that happened it would serve as a wake-up call to our society and schools in America. Nothing else seems to.
I agree. I, also, am an alum from before her reign. Her desire to set the male-female ratio at 1:1 was a de-facto quota system which resulted in 1 out of 4 females being admitted compared to 1 out of 12 males. This, plain and simple, reduced the academic quality of the student body. I saw this when I was there and professors I have kept in contact mention it all the time. Some have had to lighten up on the course material while others have been able to make do with adjusting the grading curve a bit.
This year's application looked more like a liberal arts college application than an engineering school's. I just hope MIT gets a hold of themselves and moves more in the direction of academic excellence over artificial quota systems. Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against women going to top engineering schools, but the reality is that right now if you want the best students in that field it will be less then 50% female.
My donations ceased a while ago and will not resume until this situation is corrected.
Let's say I buy $10,000 worth of stuff then after a while sell it on eBay for $5,000. I have a loss, right?
Technically, yes, but not necessarily to the IRS. The IRS, not seeing that you are running the sales as a true business (separate bank account, profit motive, etc etc) will consider it as a "hobby" in which case they treat it like a one-way valve: *any* money coming in must be taxed, but you cannot deduct expenses.
Bottom line: if they implement this and you are considering selling significant amounts of stuff, first talk to your accountant to work out a way to protect yourself from this trap. It's not all that hard to set up if you know what to do.
Over the years I have seen a good number of drive failures. In a lot of cases people have asked (and are willing to pay for my time and expenses) if I could recover data. I am successful well over half the time, and that is without any special equipment.
Many failures are indeed in the electronics board. Ebay is a great resource to find used but functional drives. Really, really try hard to get a drive with a close serial number. It sometimes makes the difference between success and failure. You do not need to do any soldering to replace the board; I have never seen a board soldered to the drive mechanism on any 5.25, 3.5 or 2.5 inch drive. Be aware some drives store parameters in eeprom which match bad blocks of the specific drive mechanism, also some store other calibration data. You will not always get all the data, and not in nice neat order. You will need a disk data recovery program to look at all the FATs and backup copies and piece things together.
I have gone even further, opening up the drive assembly. Be prepared to lose everything when you do this, but I can tell you it is a myth that the drive sill self destruct immediately if not in a clean room. I have run 10k SCSI drives for hours after replacing head and preamp assemblies and recovered data. Then I take the magnets out because the drive should never be used again (I have a wicked collection of astoundingly strong magnets).
As you guessed from the last paragraph I have seen failures of the read amps which are mounted frequently on the flex circuit going to the heads. I have replaced these chips but the patience of a saint is required not to mention a steady hand, magnifying light, and Pace SMT workstation.
I have only seen a few real head crashes. The absolute worst was a Barracuda SCSI of mine (figures) which wiped half the metalization off the platters. Then I found my DAT backups were useless. That one I decided to send to a pro shop where they determined the internal read preamp for a critical track died, probably due to heat, and somehow this caused full deflection head oscillation until crashed occurred. At least that's what they told me. The drive was in a system where the air conditioning failed and the room got to 160 degrees F while I was away.
Heat kills, indeed, and it shows up in greatly reduced MTBF of solid state components or in my case outright failure. I have not seen many wear out failures of the mechanicals, perhaps that is because I cater mostly to home and small business users who tend to turn their systems off at night. I also recommend replacement of drives where the bearings get noisy as the noise is caused by vibration and vibration can cause head crashes, and enough of those can cause a catastrophic crash with the head flipping over and scraping (which causes dust which causes the other heads to crash...).
I'm getting too old for these repairs. I can't wait until the solid state drives become common.
Peter
Every company has legal representation but that is not the point. Most companies are not in the legal business and to take on a fight in that realm costs a lot more than legal fees, it takes the company away from their focus and gets them stuck fighting a stupid lawsuit. If you have never been involved in a corporate lawsuit there is just no way I can fully explain it but the time it takes away from key personnel is simply enormous. At one company they were pretty clear that each developer and project manager was expected to bring in ten times their salary in gross income. This was in NYC where a lot of the crew made $80-100k. So the company expects one of them to be bringing in $800k-1M a year in revenue... now that may give you an idea of how expensive a lawsuit can be if they tie up a lot of people reviewing unending paperwork. They can kill you on the opportunity cost alone. This is why the lawyers you are so quick to have come to your defense will tell you that you are better off settling. And if that is the advice of your experts, you may even have a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to follow it.
You are completely missing the point. The BSA is looking to make money by getting a "settlement." If you refuse to do this they will sue and it will cost you a small furtune to even GET to a jury. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees, not to mention lost productivity. This is what they hold over your head! Either give us $30,000 or we sue you and even if you win you lose far more than that.
As they collect these settlements they use that to force other companies into settling.
I work at a small company and we have bought all our PCs from Dell with XP (and in some cases MS Office) pre-installed. Over time we have migrated to Open Office. Windows-only business applications keep us locked with Microsoft. A friend (in an admittedly larger company) in NYC told me of their BSA audit, which was triggered when they had a layoff and someone made wild accusations to the BSA hotline. Having sales receipts, POs, cancelled checks, stickers on the PCs, etc was NOT ENOUGH. The auditors will accept nothing as proof, apparently, and from minute one they were talking about a "settlement." Even before they knew if there was anything wrong! They seem to slant the audit to make sure to find fault, no matter how perfect the company is.
So that is my worry. Here I sit, with all software licensed and paid for, but unable to meet some impossible standard and being forced by an extortion scheme to pay again.
There may be ways around Vista DRM by using proprietary working formats Vista does not identify as protectable.
What I would be more concerned with is the "security" of the information that is being worked on. Without having to critically listen to every copy of the work, how can you assure that Vista's DRM hasn't triggered and reducred the quality of your work to trash without your knowledge.
Unless data integrity can be assured, there may be no alternative but to avoid Vista for any production work.
You can refuse to answer questions that seem to be way out of line. For example, if at a deposition in an intellectual property case like this you are asked if you every had any affairs and with whom and when and all the details of what you did, you could refuse and insist that it go before the judge before you answer.
Personally, I'm a pain in the ass and would just refuse certain questions and if I had to go to jail on contempt charges, so be it, but you can be most assured it would not be in vain for there would be significant press coverage. Perhaps stupid in some people's view, but that is about the only chance I would have to create public awareness of a major problem in the legal system.
Especially since the USAF was one of their site-licensed customers WGA accused of piracy.
Go ahead, shut down the USAF and see what happens...
If you take out psychology then sniping wouldn't help in the eBay proxy bid system. However, psychology plays a big part in many eBay auctions where people get emotionally involved in winning, no matter the cost.
I have bought thousands of items on eBay (and sold many also, fortunately for more than I spent!) and I can in no uncertain terms sniping is the way to go to win more auctions. When I need a part or item I set up a snipe for a bit more than I think it is worth and frequently pay less than I thought I would. There are no guarantees, though, and I most definitely do not win every auction. Before I learned to snipe (back then I despised snipers) I would bid $20 for a $5 component and usually lose but now when I bid say $7 and usually win. Yeah, this sucks for the sellers, but is made up for by the auctions I lose (frequently there is only the winning bid above mine) where the proxy bid system works as planned and boosts the selling price.
pete.phys
*All* the phones should be "wired" with some of them using the wires and others using radio transmission, and this should not be known to the test subjects nor the people setting up the tests (double blind).
Peter
Perhaps their army of high-priced lawyers will come up with some great defenses, ways to beat back the various laws.
Then we can all use them.
Very clever, let the MPAA pay for attacking these insane anti-citizen's rights laws.
I already have several calls from clients who want me to shut off open access in their places of business. Yes, they have firewalls and are protected, but the DA Jenine Pirro has come out and said how open wireless hotspots help pedophiles and stalkers and these business owners do not want to get involved with this political hot potatoe in any way whatsoever. Their feeling is that it simply is not worth the risk anymore.